Sharing this podcast is one of the most vulnerable things I have done. Discussing my pain with such transparency in a public format is deeply uncomfortable.
And yet, this is a vital conversation that needs to be happening. Unprocessed racial trauma tears lives apart, and it will continue to do so as long as the wounds of racial inequity continue to fester underneath the surface of American values.
I agreed to doing this very personal interview with Lori on The Raw and Wild Hearts Podcast because she is an old, dear friend, who I trusted to be present with me throughout the process of recording this show, and more importantly, the very tender place of sharing it openly with the world.
I ask that you listen with an open heart and open mind, with the willingness to look past your personal experience and into the much deeper wound racism has inflicted on our entire culture.
In this interview, Lori and I discuss…
- Our history, how we met
- How the system is broken
- Receiving the message that I was defective, “If I would have been born 5 years earlier I would have been illegal”
- Childhood education, deep-seeded beliefs
- Exploring the belief that if you talk about race, you are racist
- Color blindness and the destructive outcome in that school of thought
- Dominant culture sets the values of that culture
- Generational trauma of racism
- Racial trauma, family trauma, growing up bi-racial in an affluent white neighborhood
- The almost fatal result of the accumulative trauma of being a person of color in America
- The danger of the binary assumption the a bad person is racist and a good person is not
- Racism is the air we breathe, it’s not personal
- Test your implicit bias
- Systemic barriers demonstrated in a bird cage analogy
- The structure is a reflection of the mind, change starts within
